Psychological Science最新文献

The positive relation between mental health and educational attainment is well established, yet the extent to which cognitive abilities influence this gradient or independently predict mental health outcomes remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the association between adolescent cognitive abilities, educational attainment, and adult mental health. Cognitive ability was ascertained in Norwegian military conscript test data (N = 272,351; mean age 17.8 years; males only), whereas mental disorders were ascertained using the Norwegian register of primary care diagnoses received between the age of 36-40. Higher cognitive abilities were associated with a monotonically decreasing risk of developing all the studied mental disorders except bipolar disorder. The association held even when comparing the cognitive abilities of brothers raised in the same family, attesting that cognitive ability and mental disorders are not associated because both arise from the same family background circumstances. Similarly, individuals with higher educational attainment had fewer mental health disorders. The association between low cognitive abilities and the risk of mental disorders was notably stronger in males with low educational attainment, compared to those with high educational attainment. These individuals may be an underutilized target group for mental-disorder prevention.

A powerful cue when reasoning is whether an apparent consensus has been reached. However, we do not yet know how the strength of this cue varies between different individuals and types of claims. In the current study (N = 78 U.S. adults, recruited from Prolific), we evaluated this with a realistic mock social-media paradigm in which each participant evaluated 60 diverse, real-world claims based on posts from people who either disagreed with each other, formed a consensus independently, or formed a consensus using shared sources. Almost all participants revised their beliefs to align with the consensus; many also qualitatively changed their minds. A consensus was also more persuasive for claims more likely to have a ground truth (i.e., more knowable claims). Although most people were insensitive to consensus independence, some were more persuaded by a consensus formed independently, whereas some were equally convinced by a consensus formed using the same sources.

Resource constraints in neural information processing imply that numerical discriminability optimally adapts to the frequency of numerical magnitudes in a decision maker's environment. Here, we tested the economic consequences of efficient numerical range adaptation in representative samples of the United Kingdom and Japan (N = 2,309) and in a replication in Austria and Hungary (N = 607). We exploited natural variation in currency units and combined it with an orthogonal variation in experimental currency units to detect the effect of habitual versus nonhabitual numerical ranges on the incidence of errors in decisions under risk. The results highlight the direct economic importance of numerical adaptation, thus calling into question standard assumptions that choice quantities are perceived without noise.

Languages tend to describe "who is doing what to whom" by placing subjects before objects. This may reflect a bias for agents in event cognition: Agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is shared with nonhuman animals. We presented Guinea baboons (Papio papio; N = 13) with a change-detection paradigm on chasing animations. The baboons were trained to respond to a color change that was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which could not be explained by low-level features in our stimuli such as the chaser's motion pattern or position. An agent preference may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates that could have become externalized in language as a tendency to place the subject first.

Humans rely on more knowledgeable individuals to acquire information. But when we are ignorant, how are we to tell who is knowledgeable? We propose that human knowledge is nested: People who know only a few things tend to know very common pieces of information, whereas rare pieces of information are known only by people who know many things, including common things. This leads to the possibility of reliably inferring knowledgeability from minimal cues. In this study (N = 848 U.S. adults recruited online), we show that individuals can accurately gauge others' knowledgeability on the basis of very limited information, relying on their ability to estimate the rarity of different pieces of knowledge and on the fact that knowing a rare piece of information indicates a high likelihood of knowing more information in the same theme. Even participants who are largely ignorant of a theme can infer how knowledgeable other individuals are on the basis of the possession of a single piece of knowledge.

The gambler's fallacy is typically defined as the false belief that a random event is less likely to occur if it has occurred recently. Although forms of this fallacy have been documented numerous times, past work either has not actually measured probabilistic predictions but rather point predictions or used sequences that were not independent. To address these problems, we conducted a series of high-powered, preregistered studies in which we asked 750 adult Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States to report probabilistic predictions for truly independent sequences. In contrast to point predictions, which generated a significant gambler's fallacy, probabilistic predictions were not found to lead to a gambler's fallacy. Moreover, the point predictions could not be reconstructed by sampling from the probability judgments. This suggests that the gambler's fallacy originates at the decision stage rather than in probabilistic reasoning, as posited by several leading theories. New theories of the gambler's fallacy may be needed to explain these findings.

Most people believe in human-caused climate change, yet this public consensus can be collectively underestimated (pluralistic ignorance). Across two studies using primary data (n = 3,653 adult participants; 11 countries) and secondary data (ns = 60,230 and 22,496 adult participants; 55 countries), we tested (a) the generalizability of pluralistic ignorance about climate-change beliefs, (b) the effects of a public-consensus intervention on climate action, and (c) the possibility that cultural tightness-looseness might serve as a country-level predictor of pluralistic ignorance. In Study 1, people across 11 countries underestimated the prevalence of proclimate views by at least 7.5% in Indonesia (90% credible interval, or CrI = [5.0, 10.1]), and up to 20.8% in Brazil (90% CrI = [18.2, 23.4]. Providing information about the actual public consensus on climate change was largely ineffective, except for a slight increase in willingness to express one's proclimate opinion, δ = 0.05 (90% CrI = [-0.02, 0.11]). In Study 2, pluralistic ignorance about willingness to contribute financially to fight climate change was slightly more pronounced in looser than tighter cultures, highlighting the particular need for pluralistic-ignorance research in these countries.

The current study examined bidirectional relationships between well-being and cognitive function using up to 10 annual assessments (M = 5.67, SD = 3.43) of different types of well-being and a comprehensive cognitive battery from a sample of older adults living in the Chicago metropolitan area (N = 1,702; mean age = 81.07 years, SD = 8.04; 75.1% White Americans, 23.9% Black Americans). Bivariate latent growth curve models indicated older adults who started out with better well-being also had better cognitive function, and sharper decreases in well-being were associated with sharper declines in cognitive function. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models indicated older adults with better well-being on average had better cognitive function on average. Further, well-being change at one time point predicted subsequent cognitive change and vice versa. These findings were stronger for eudaimonic well-being and sense of purpose than for life satisfaction. Findings highlight the role of well-being in the goal to combat cognitive decline, as well as the importance of supporting well-being in individuals experiencing cognitive decline.

Certain emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) are associated with better well-being and are therefore seen as adaptive (health-promoting) strategies. However, it is unlikely that any strategy is adaptive regardless of context. Indeed, reappraisal is associated with positive outcomes in the context of uncontrollable life stress but negative outcomes in the context of controllable life stress. It follows that individuals who have better "strategy-situation fit" (use reappraisal more during uncontrollable vs. controllable situations) should have better well-being beyond their habitual reappraisal use. A previous test of this hypothesis found that strategy-situation fit in daily life was associated with greater well-being (N = 74). We conducted a well-powered preregistered direct replication of this study in 285 U.S. adults. We failed to replicate the original findings and found no evidence for the strategy-situation fit hypothesis, including when accounting for key confounders and moderators. We discuss implications for theory and future research.